The christianisation of hermanubis

Abstract

One of the most traditional religions that Christianity confronted in Late Antiquity was the Ancient Egyptian. Christianity had reached Egypt as early as the first century and had developed considerably by the IV century. The new religion brought a new ideology and its acceptance by the local population, and the inhabitants of the Hellenistic and the Roman worlds worked on different levels. This paper is dealing with the possible 'christianisation' of the cult of Hermanubis (the dog-headed mediator between the two worlds and the escort of the souls in the afterlife), a Graeco-Egyptian deity that was perhaps one of the ancestors of the dog-headed Saint Christopher, who had been worshiped especially within the Orthodox Church.